Android development and money stuff

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About Johannes Borchardt

Johannes is the co-founder of ANDLABS, a company specialized in Android development. Starting his mobile career in 2008, he has been building up Android expertise since the beginning. He has helped several bluechip companies get their Android apps ready, gives talks on conferences on a regular basis and published several articles in field-related journals.
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Edit: I totally forgot to mention this: Marc Galeazzi put together a list of income reports, maybe that’s some interesting data for you.

April is over, time to sum things up. I’m quite late this time, I apologize for that.

If you are new to this series, let me explain it to you: Since Android is an open platform, I decided to be open about the income I’m making with my private Android apps too. In the last report I aimed to reach $4,000 for the last month. You will see if it worked out.

What did I do?

I tried a new ad network, SellAring, in the AL Voice Recorder. SellAring is an ad network specialized in audio ads. These ads are played in the timeframe the user is waiting for a called person to pick up a call. It needs at least four permissions, five other permissions can be added to increase efficiency.

The overall performance of the network was not satisfying. The fillrate started high but dropped fast. In addition, the new permissions stopped a lot of users from downloading the app which again resulted in a worse position on the result page for “Voice Recorder” in the Play Store. The users that updated or downloaded the app also didn’t like it, the comments were clear about that. On the pro side is the fast payment. It happened a couple of days after the month’s end.

By today, I’m not using SellAring anymore.

Advertising Stats

Here are some statistics from the two advertising networks I’m using, AdMob and Madvertise. Please read the second income report for an explanation of the following numbers.

AdMob:

Requests: 591,169 (-95k)

Impressions: 581,342 (-92k)

Fill Rate: 98.34% (0.26%)

Clicks: 24,579 (-5.8k)

CTR: 4.23% (-0.3%)

eCPM: $1.56 (-$0.52)

House Ads: 741 (554)

Adjusted Requests: 591,910 (-95k)

Adjusted Fill Rate: 98.21% (+0.16%)

Madvertise

Requests: 1,357,737 (-193k)

Impressions: 106,949 (12k)

Fill Rate: 7.88% (1.76%)

Clicks: 3,603 (598)

CTR: 3.37% (0.2%)

eCPM: $5.76 ($2.75)

madvertise’s fillrate and eCPM got up a little again which is somewhat good news. The overall requests declined, I think this can be attributed to the SellAring integration.

How much?

Here are the numbers:

AdMob:

3D Invaders: $348.46

AL Voice Recorder: $557.95

AdMob Total: $906.41 (-$497.45)

madvertise:

3D Invaders: ~$477.57

AL Voice Recorder: ~$138.11

madvertise Total: ~$615.68 ($330.10)

Market sales: ~$84.32 (-$42.27)

In-App purchases: ~$9.59 ($1.65)

SellAring: $174.35

Total: ~$1,790.35 (-$33.61)

What’s next?

I’m still as far from the goal of $4,000 as I was in the last months. To be a bit more realistic, I will set my goal for this month at $2,000.

Please feel free to share your own experiences and hints in the comments. Ask questions, share, do whatever you like.

Thanks for the details. I too had some bad experiences implementing sellAring, they are out of my apps now. I thought the reduction of some permissions would have been good, but I guess it is still not acceptable by users.

Useful info. And don’t reduce your goal. It really doesn’t do good to aim lower.

But I’d say stick to how you’re taking it. Don’t pressure yourself into a “must” to meet the goal, as that’s what has driven many developers away from this passion.

I am a big fan of your blog. Thank you for sharing.
I am wondering your admob CTR (over 4%). It’s really amazing high.
Did admob find you any trouble? Since I know admob will ban our account.

Here is data of my app:
admob
6000 user/day
10k impression/day
clicks 1000
ctr about 1.0%
Even my ctr is not high, but I am still a little worry, since I only have 1000 click with 6000 users in one day.

I didn’t have any issues with AdMob so far and I hope their algorithms are smart enough to separate good apps of fraud clicks. A friend of mine had problems with madvertise but saved the data of the clicks separately and by this was able to proof the correctness of his clicks.

Hi Jaroslav,
yeah, I know. Unfortunately the link is generated by the title and since the link was already spread when Sebi informed me about the title, I have to keep it the way it is. Or find some redirect plugin for wordpress :-)
Thank you for the hint though.

I’m also wondering about the CTR rate of 4% at 60 seconds in Admob. Mine is at 0.40% at 30 seconds. And I have another problem with admob, since I started my app the eCPM is decreasing and decreasing. First it was at 0.12$ and yesterday (SUNDAY) I reached the bottom with 0.04$.
I’m don’t understandt that and I implemented another network MoPub. there I get about 0.35$ at 60 seconds, not good but much better than Admob.

I’m writing to ask you about march payment from madvertise. Did you get this payment this month? It will be my first payment but I still didn’t get it to my bank account. I received only e-mail from them with “credit note” for march and nothing more. I was writing to them to get some info but no response.

First I need to say that you’re making a great job with your apps and this blog. Reading this blog I started to programm in Android 2 month ago. My first no was so bad (23$ in 10 days). My revenue was more and less very stable all these days, But yesterday my impressiones went to zero, this was suddenly from one day to another. I didn’t made any update of my app. I have no idea why this happens.

Found this through the Android Weekly newsletter and think this is an ace idea! I’m only just gettiong into Android dev and think it’s pretty cool that every month your posting these results because the figures give me something to read and work out the links between the different data sets. Understanding my adsense results when I began internet marketing without having another data set prooved jute a challenge. Now I have your results to start off with I have a comparison to make with my own. Makes understanding the figures much easier for me :) Most people (including me) tend to keep their earning reports to themselves, good on you for sharing!

First i would never ever ever use an adnetwork that want to play audioads in a call, if i install an app and notice that i would uninstall it right away no matter how good the app was. And that type of adverts will never be in our games.

Also for your game, i would check out W3i. We are working with them right now for our next game MEGATROID. Really nice company and easy to work with. http://www.w3i.com

I am fairly new to the App game and even newer to your blog so first off, thank you for your openness. It is very valuable to someone like me. Second, I am not sure that I understand the data that you are compiling so forgive me if my questions are misplaced.

Do you know what percentage of the click throughs actually download your app, or is that what you mean by the CTR?

Also, when you calculate your eCPM does that include the costs of your advertising? if so what other data is used to compile that number? It seems interesting to me that the fill rate is so low on the Madvertise but the eCPM is so much higher than the AdMob.

nevermind, there are no bad questions, only bad answers ;-)
The numbers I’m posting here are describing my generated income, hence they are not related to ad campaigns initiated by me. Please take a look at the section Advertising stats of this report for an explanation of the abbreviations.
The higher eCPM/lower fillrate is due to madvertise’s focus on premium campaigns in the western and middle european region, where prices for ads are high compared to most of the rest of the world.

If you want to track the success of your ad campaigns, I recommend a quick google for the com.android.vending.INSTALL_REFERRER action.

do you have an idea how and when stats are updated on madvertise and Admob? I am getting a lot of Ad Impressions and Clicks very early on the day (0:00 – 2:00) from Madvertise and quite some Revenue from AdMob. It slows down over the day and madvertise gets slower and slower. Contrary, even before I integrated Madvertise, Admob gets more and more traffic and Clicks. It seems that 2/3 of Impressions and Clicks are recognized after 6 p.m.
I could imagine that madvertise has something like a daily Cap, so they cannot display so much ads in the evening? Or are the AdMob-Statistics just lagging behind while madvertise is more on time?

Still it is very strange, that I get much Clicks from Madvertise from 0:00 to 2:00 in the night, but very little between 18:00 and 24:00.

Also I am confused about how Madvertise counts Ad Impressions and Requests. In my App, Views change very fast and on every View, the ad is loaded again. When I test my app, I get every time the same Ad. I would suspect, that every View counts as an Ad Request, but if the same Ad is loaded again, it does not count as an Ad Impression, which then leads to a very low Fill Rate (which I have, even so my App is only in German Language and most users are from Germany).

Can you change the refresh rate in madvertise Backend? Or do I have to upload a new APK? I just thought I should try to set this to a minimuim to improve my fillrate. Also my CTR looks way too high as it actually is, because 90% of the Ad Impressions (when the ad is reloaded) are not recorded.

I think madvertise once had a realtime approach but I don’t know if that’s still the case. I can imagine that most of the budget is spent in the first two hours of the day because their fillrate is really low these days.
Madvertise’s counts is an interesting thing. It works like that: Once an ad is received, it is cached. If you then start for example a new activity that also holds an MadvertiseView, this cached ad is shown until the network returns with a new ad. If the cached ad is shown, this neither counts as a request nor as an impression.
AFAIK its not possible to set the refresh rate in the madvertise backend. You could use the MadvertiseCallbackListener to keep track of actual impressions and clicks if you don’t trust the madvertise statistics if you want.

Do you also have such low fill rates, even for Germany? It starts in the night with 40-50% (2 a.m.) and drops to 1-3% at the end of the day. My App is only running since two weeks – are the current fill rates normal or do you expect them to get better in the next weeks or months?

85% of my customers are from Germany, 8% from Austria and 4% from Switzerland.

Another strange thing is that almost every time I load my App myself, I get an ad impression from Madvertise.

According to a report I receive from madvertise every month, in April my fillrate for Germany is 100%. From that reports I can see that the main reason for the decrease of my earnings is a CPC that is about half and that there are almost no ads in Spain anymore. However, the last month was so bad, it’s very likely that the fillrate in Germany suffered a lot last month. I’LL let you know when I know more.

Why shouldn’t you get an impression? In case you are using the isTestMode-flag: The last time I used it, I also received valid ads, seems to be a server-side bug.

Great blog, just started reading it recently and very interested in results. Why sellaring dont work? Also, have you try Leadbolt or Airpush? They have made me lot of money, maybe you should check out to reach goal faster than AdMob.

For study: I make $200 a month with AdMob, about $1,000 with Airpush and $3,000 leadbolt.

It didn’t fill well.
For me it was an experiment on acceptance. I expected it to be between the acceptance of push ads and banner ads but it was more on the push-ad-level which I didn’t like, so I removed it.